PASTOR and two Bible studies teachers bashed a 19-year-old Korean woman because they thought she had been disrespectful to her parents and had stopped attending church.
Chi Yeong Yun, a junior pastor at the Open Door Presbyterian Church in Chatswood, and Bible study teachers James Kang and Tom Chae-Young Lee pleaded guilty yesterday to assaulting Angela Kim at a park at Sydney’s Bobbin Head in July last year.
The NSW District Court heard the men believed the young woman had stopped going to church, had been disrespectful to her elders and had been spending too much time on her web page.
Kang, who the court heard stood 180cm tall and weighed more than 130kg, had telephoned Ms Kim at the request of Yun and arranged to meet her at Waitara railway station in northern Sydney.
Kang and his friend Lee picked her up about 9pm and drove her to the Bobbin Head park where they and Yun beat her and kicked her over a two-hour period.
She suffered extensive bruising to her head, arms, buttocks and legs.
All three men said they now realised what they had done was wrong and against the law.
“For a person like me, 180cm, 130kg, it’s just not hard hitting a girl. Hitting a girl, it just isn’t right,” Kang said.
He said he had heard through the Open Door Church that Ms Kim had “showed disrespect to her parents, and did some trouble”.
“She had no idea of respect, she was just hanging around with her friends,” Lee said.
Acting Judge Gibson today sentenced the men from Chatswood’s Korean Open Door Presbyterian Church to prison terms of up to one year, saying protecting their culture was not an excuse to break the law.
He told the men their steps to stop their culture being eroded could not be taken against women, who could not be coerced or beaten to comply.